Kontextmaschine

21st April 2014

Post reblogged from 100% Pure americanism with 736 notes

kontextmaschine:
I myself think that Batman is the flip side of Santa Claus, who - as I’ve said - in turn is the modern vision of the Christian God.
The lineage follows that in the age of desert nomadism, God was a force that created water and food in the desert and rearranged inconvenient geography - mountains, seas; that in the age of early settlement and tribal war he demanded ethnic solidarity, granting in return victory in war; that in the era where settled tribes were subsumed into Mediterranean empire, he was a fisherman/shepherd who unified mankind and ended war; that in the era of courtly feudalism he was at the head of heirarchies of angels, saints rewarded with face time to press their clients’ claims; and so obviously in the age of bourgeois democracy he’s an industrialist who rewards socially approved behavior with consumer goods and punishes its opposite with violence.
“Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?”
—From “Nackles”, by Donald Westlake

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